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NEW FISH SPECIES: THE ROMECUP ROBOTS, AN AQUARIUM POPULATED BY AUTOMATS
(ANSA) – Rome, 16 March – An ancient fish, a gardening squid and schools of other fish … They’re a new and particular species of robots that inspect submarine environments or interact with real fish in aquariums. A taste of this new wave of robotic fish was available today in Piazza del Campidoglio for the RomeCup. The aquarium was installed by the Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna di Pisa, Campus Bio Medico di Roma and Mediterraneum, the Rome Aquarium.
The Sant’Anna Lamprey, developed to study the neural mechanisms of animal locomotion, were also in the aquarium. As soft as an eel, explains Paolo Dario from Sant’Anna, it will be used for submarine expeditions, for environmental research and to study real fish. Sant’Anna has also produced an Octopus: a submarine robot equipped with incredibly flexible arms. “Octopus,” Dario explains, “will be used in many ambits. We have a project to adopt it for medicine, surgery, biopsies and endocopies."
Octopus, however, could also become a gadening squid used to remove dangerous algae from sea beds. The Campus biomedico di Roma has produced “grouper-robot” with the ambitious project of studing fish both in aquariums and in the open sea explains Eugenio Guglielmelli, head of the biomedical robotics laboratory. These prototypes, Dario points out, are the demonstration of how useful robotics can be to mankind. “The environmental disaster in the Gulf of Mexico was contained thanks to a robot that plugged the leak in the oil platform, which is really what we need now to operate in the nuclear plants damaged by the Japan earthquake."
